itself, that no observant reader will be apt to question it.  Verplanck tells us he had formed the same opinion before he learned through Mr. Collier what Coleridge thought on the subject; and his judgment of the matter is given with characteristic felicity as follows:  “The contrast of two different modes of thought and manners of expression, here mixed in the same piece, must be evident to all who have made the shades and gradations of Shakespeare’s varying and progressive taste and mind at all a subject of study."[19]

[19] The point is further amplified and illustrated by the same critic in a passage equally happy, as follows:  “Much of the graver dialogue, especially in the first two Acts, reminds the reader, in taste of composition, in rhythm, and in a certain quaintness of expression, of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.  The comic part is spirited and laugh-provoking, yet it consists wholly in the exposure of a braggart coxcomb,—­one of the most familiar comic personages of the stage, and quite within the scope of a boyish artist’s knowledge of life and power of satirical delineation.  On the other hand, there breaks forth everywhere, and in many scenes entirely predominates, a grave moral thoughtfulness, expressed in a solemn, reflective, and sometimes in a sententious brevity of phrase and harshness of rhythm, which seem to me to stamp many passages as belonging to the epoch of Measure for Measure, or of King Lear.  We miss, too, the gay and fanciful imagery which shows itself continually, alike amidst the passion and the moralizing of the previous comedies.”

I have elsewhere observed at some length[20] on the Poet’s diversities of style, marking them off into three periods, severally distinguished as earlier, middle, and later styles.  Outside of the play itself, we have in this case no help towards determining at what time the revisal was made, or how long a period intervened between this and the original writing.  To my taste, the better parts of the workmanship relish strongly of the Poet’s later style,—­perhaps I should say quite as strongly as the poorer parts do of his earlier.  This would bring the revisal down to as late a time as 1603 or 1604:  which date accords, not only with my own sense of the matter, but with the much better judgment of the critics I have quoted.  I place the finished Hamlet at or near the close of the Poet’s middle period; and I am tolerably clear that in this play he discovers a mind somewhat more advanced in concentrated fulness, and a hand somewhat more practised in sinewy sternness, than in the finished Hamlet.  I will quote two passages by way of illustrating the Poet’s different styles as seen in this play.  The first is from the dialogue of Helena and the King, in Act ii., scene 1, where she persuades him to make trial of her remedy: 

[20] Page 190 of this volume.